The sage on the stage—a professor lecturing to an auditorium
full of students—is what massive open online courses (MOOCs) were trying to get
away from. Unfortunately, it’s also proven to be an effective way for MOOCs to
deliver information on a large scale.
NovoEd,
a new MOOC provider launched last April, is trying to change that with courses focused
on student participation and collaboration, according to a report in Campus Technology.
“The problem right now with most MOOCs out there is
that they are focusing on the most boring part of education: the talking head
and multiple-choice questions,” said Amin Saberi, an associate professor of
engineering at Stanford and founder of NovoEd. “Education is not the content;
it’s what you take with you when you forget the content.”
The company has developed a platform that uses social
media to encourage student interaction and foster collaboration. It also
created algorithms to organize students into groups.
NovoEd offers almost 30 courses ranging from everyday
mathematics to anatomy, but is mainly focused on entrepreneurship through a
partnership with Babson Global. Saberi told Bloomberg BusinessWeek in August
that nearly 350,000 students had studied entrepreneurship using the platform, with
completion rates as high as 47%. Additionally, those student teams launched
more than 7,000 new businesses.
“MOOCs will destroy geographical boundaries,” said Anne
Trumbore, senior course designer for NovoEd. “People who are passionately
interested in a topic but spread out across the world will finally be able to
collaborate in a real way and form communities around their interests.”
